TAYLOR RAY

Budweiser Spokesmodel, Swimsuit Model

I was the last person I thought would ever dance naked. When I was eighteen I had a friend who was dancing and she said, "Oh, come on, just try it." So I got one of those little cat outfits with the ears and the tail and all, but when I went up on stage I started crying. I just couldn't do it, so I went back to the Sambo's where I had been working.

One night this crazy customer went off on me. I tried to handle him, but after a lot of abuse I yelled back at him, and he grabbed my hair and started banging my head on the table, right there in a family restaurant in front of kids and everything. Everybody just stood around and did nothing. I decided to go back to the club where my girlfriend worked, where I knew I would at least be protected physically, and this time I could do it.

I ended up managing and bartending at strip clubs for a few years, because I really didn't want to dance. Then one night one of the feature dancers came into the office to have me help her count her tips and she poured out a whole pillowcase full of dollar bills. I decided to start featuring right then and there.

I had done some modeling on the side, including some for Venus swimwear, so I decided to use my "swimwear model" as one of my titles. I had done a swimsuit centerfold that wasn't nude, but it qualified me as a centerfold.

At first I wouldn't dance nude, but I couldn't get enough bookings. Then Melissa Wolf took me up to Canada, and I found I could do it. It was a little different there because they did shows. I called my sister and we put together a duo act and got booked constantly.

I'm still sort of a priss, though. It got me into trouble with the one photo shoot I tried to do. My agent told me that I needed more credits-I'd never done the magazines or anything-so I thought that if I could handle dancing nude when I never thought I could, I could handle that. I set up a shoot with Stephen Hicks and went to LA to do it. I did the shoot with one of his assistants.

We got into the nude part of the shoot, but when he wanted me to spread my legs and play with myself, it just didn't work for me. I had to stop. So I signed a release for the shots we'd done, and that was the end of that.

A few months later I got this weird phone call from my agent saying, "I guess there are some things I didn't know about you."

Then I got this call from my mother, crying. My agent sends all my stuff to my mother, and she had opened a package, and there I was in this phone sex ad. My agent had taped a note to it saying, "What is this?"

Anyway, it turned out that because they couldn't use the shoot for magazines, they had decided to use it for phone sex ads. The only thing was, it wasn't graphic enough, so what they did was put a black box over my crotch and used the line, "Chicks with dicks." I guess without a clear look at what was between my legs, they couldn't tell if I was a man or a woman! Once we got it all figured out and my mom was calmed down, we laughed so hard. That ad is still in some of the weirder magazines.

People keep telling me that I need to do the magazines, but I figure if I'm working every week, there's no reason.

I invented this fat-free potato chip. I have the patent on the process and everything. I was making the chips in my microwave and selling them at the gym where I worked out, and everyone was going crazy over them, so I decided to market them. My girlfriend and I did them in four microwaves out of our houses. We got all these orders and we had no way to fill them; we blew out the microwaves.

We called all these companies and told them about how we wanted to mass-produce the chips, but they told us it couldn't be done-there weren't any fat-free potato chips on the market back then.

One night we were watching Oral Roberts, and right after that was a show about how lumber was processed, and we saw them putting it through this gigantic microwave oven and were like, "That's it!" So we called this company and had the chips analyzed for fat content to prove they were fat-free, and we had the results, so we convinced them that we were food scientists and that this huge microwave oven they made would dry out our potatoes.

Now, we had no idea if this would work. We got a guy who owned a cookie company to believe that this oven that we had never tried would do the job. So he gave us forty thousand dollars for this demo of the machine. It was all a huge snow job, but we did think we knew what we were doing.

We had spent the money for six hours on this machine, and for five hours nothing came out of it but burnt-up chips. The guy with the money started tearing up Styrofoam cups and screaming at us. When we had only forty-five minutes left, we got it to work, and he changed his tune and went and started building the plant.

Unfortunately, by this time it was 1992 and Charles Keating got busted for that savings and loan stuff and it put our guy out of business. By the time we got other investors, other companies had come up with their own ways of producing fat-free chips, so we didn't make the big money. But that company has sold lots of those machines to snack food companies. It's kind of sad that it didn't work out, but it was a really exciting time for us.

And that's how I almost lived out my Famous Amos story. Look at Mrs. Field's Cookies. It's amazing what people can do. And I still feel like anything can happen. I'm dancing again, and that's fine, but there's always a chance I'll invent another thing. Or maybe you will. It happens for people all the time. I think everything happens for a reason.